Motor planning
the process by which a person anticipates and implements the movement of the body
In psychology and neuroscience, motor planning is a set of processes related to the preparation of a movement that occurs during the reaction time (the time between the presentation of a stimulus to a person and that person's initiation of a motor response). Colloquially, the term applies to any process involved in the preparation of a movement during the reaction time, including perception-related and action-related processes.
Broad vs. narrow definition
In broad definition, motor planning is referred to as any process that occurs during reaction time (RT) as a preparation of the incoming movement. This definition can include motion preparations that are not strictly motor-related. For example, the identification of a task-relevant stimulus is captured by the usual meaning of the term, "motor planning", but this identification process is not strictly motor-related.
Wong and colleagues (2015) have proposed a narrower definition to include only movement-related processes: "Specification of the movement trajectory for the desired action, a description of how the end-effector will produce such an action, and finally a description of the full set of the joint trajectories or muscle activations required to execute the movement."
Stages and theoretical models of motor planning
Motor planning is explained by several competing and complementary theoretical models. Most commonly, motor planning in broad definition is explained to have three distinct hierarchical processes.
First stage: Perceptual decision-making
This process is first triggered by attention, where a person selects an object of the interest from their surrounding environment. They then apply a cognitive rule (e.g.,"reach to the red mug"), which then lead to a motor goal formation, where attention and the rules are combined to identify the desired outcomes.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q39045793. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2015.
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This entry incorporates text from “Motor planning” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.